Review: FPCT's DEAD MAN'S CELL PHONE Only Rings Softly

After Everyman's production of Jump, reviewed here a three weeks ago, a play which induced a strong "What the hell just happened?" feeling, I did not expect to find myself quickly re-encountering that sensation. But here it was again, with Fells Point Corner Theatre's production of Sarah Ruhl's 2007 play Dead Man's Cell Phone. The show seems to mess with its own internal reality, rendering a consistent through-line of its plot hard to discern. However, with a fair amount of thinking it over, and a quick review of the script, one can mostly dispel that feeling; accepting the play's fantastic premises and a plot development of a sort made notorious by the TV show Dallas, one can untangle the story. But to what end should one bother? I have not successfully answered that question for myself.

The play starts out as an amiable, if slightly creepy, shaggy dog story. Our protagonist Jean (Laura Malkus), sitting in a café, is annoyed by the repeated chiming at a nearby table of a cellphone which its owner, the only other diner there, does not answer. The problem turns out to be that the diner, whom we learn is named Gordon (Morgan Stanton), has just dropped dead. Jean appropriates the phone without quite meaning to, and soon finds herself drawn into Gordon's life as well. She will meet Gordon's widow Hermia (Kay-Megan Washington), his brother Dwight (J. Purnell Hargrove), and his mother Harriet (Marianne Gazolla Angelella), each one his or her own particular brand of screwy. She will meet a peculiar and shady business associate of Gordon's, the Stranger (Penelope Chan), who turns up with very different personalities and accents at different points in the action. Indeed, as the proceedings grow woolier, Jean will meet the afterlife version of Gordon himself. Jean's involvement with this motley crew is propelled by an insatiable desire to be helpful, accompanied and facilitated by a dangerous penchant for telling tall tales as a way of helping. It appears that playwright Ruhl's objective was to make Jean's journey about itself, i.e. to make Jean's (and by extension the audience's) encounter with these quirky folks the very payoff of the exercise, i.e. the reason to bother.

One problem with leaving this as the reason, however, is that a cavalcade of screwiness is seldom enough. There generally has to be something additional to make it enjoyable. Usually, in true screwball comedy there's a romance one cares about (the romance in this show was barely recognizable as such), and maybe some social satire as well (possibly of Gordon's gradually revealed line of work, but not otherwise). Worse, if one accepts the hypothesis that the encounter with these idiosyncratic characters is the main draw of the play, in this production, at least, the characters' motivations and agendas were often illegible. Mother Harriet, for instance, is gratingly unpleasant almost every moment she's onstage, without any explanation why that I could detect. Her weird behavior around food (serving nothing but meat to dinner guests among other things) might portend something beyond a large grocery bill - but what exactly? Insanity? Or take Jean, our point of view character; she can't be an everywoman, because she seems to have no life outside of her reckless probing of the world of the cellphone owner, and everywomen, by contrast, have lives. When Jean falls for another character, it seems sudden and forced, a plot convenience at best, even with some kissing. It's hard to tell if a different director might have given this relatively shapeless group more definition, but it's a given that an audience's inability to tell where the characters are coming from usually interferes with, rather than heightens, that audience's enjoyment of the show.

There's another hypothesis I've seen floated as to why we might bother with this play, namely its presentation of the strange place cellphones hold in and the effect they have upon our lives. Ruhl herself is quoted in the FPCT press release as having said: "Cell phones, iPads, wireless computers will change people in ways we don't even understand. We're less connected to the present." Fine, but the play doesn't go very deep into this subject. We do get a sense of the potential annoyingness and the practical ubiquity of cellphones, not to mention their proclivity for interrupting conversations and stimulating inconsiderate behavior, but that's not a lesson we need to be taught much in 2023. Indeed before the performance I attended, I and everyone else in the small lobby awaiting the opening of the house had to endure exposure to a loudly-delivered single side of one theatergoer's extended cellphone conversation, after which any reminders embedded in the play became superfluous. But they would have been anyway. We all get the impact of cellphones. And so far as I can recall, the message was already superfluous sixteen years ago when the play premiered.

Am I saying, then, that this play had no redeeming features? Not at all; there were some really good monologues, for instance. Two stand out in particular: Hermia's drunken, randy and raunchy dissertation on the last time she had sex with her husband (which Kay-Megan Washington delivers with gleeful abandon), and the chilling explanation by Gordon's ghost of the nefarious business he had been in, and his coldly self-serving justification of having been in it (a turn by Morgan Stanton that chilled me and made me laugh at the same time). (Stanton is pictured above.) And close behind these moments would be the mean, dry eulogy (if you can call it that) that Harriet delivers at her son's funeral. If the whole play consisted of such set pieces, it would have been appreciably more engaging. And I think it's telling that Jean, the audience's proxy if any character is, never gets a similar speech. This isn't surprising, as she not only comes from nowhere, but she doesn't seem to have learned anything worthy of summing up. And neither have we.

I guess the short of it is, the play doesn't do either superficiality or depth well. And so a decent production like this (which FPCT provided) can still only go so far with it.

Dead Man's Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Kimberly Lynne, presented through March 12 at Fells Point Corner Theatre, 251 South Ann Street, Baltimore, MD 21231. Tickets $24, at https://www.fpct.org/dead-mans-cell-phone. Adult language, sexual situations.

Production photo credit: Kiirstn Pagan.